Not sure when the next planned release is, but it might be worth
adding the proposed entry in MANIFEST.MF for modules. It isn't
guaranteed to be in the final JDK 9, but my best guess is that it
won't change now. It would involve making a pom.xml change to add this
to the manifest:

Automatic-Module-Name: org.apache.commons.lang3

This allows other projects to safely depend on [lang3]. Ultimately,
we'll have to add a module-info, but this is a much simpler first
step.

we have fixed quite a few bugs and added some nice new features since
Commons Lang 3.5 was released, so I would like to release Commons Lang 3.6
based on RC2.
The reason we had to cut a second release is, that there were some
discussions around the annotations for documenting concurrency properties
in the o.a.c.l.concurrent.annotation package. I’ve removed those
annotations, so that we can fix them after the release.